American National Standard (ANSI)/Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) 35, entitled Digital Program Insertion Cueing Message for Cable, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, was developed to support splicing Moving Pictures Expert Groups (MPEG) streams for the purposes of digital program insertion. While the present invention is not limited to MPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or any other transport stream platform, the use of cueing messages, such as but not limited to those described in ANSI/SCTE 35, to identify avails or other portions of television programs or other media/content as being amenable to digital program insertion is illustrative of a scenario where broadcasters or other originators of content format transport streams, signaling, etc. to facilitate program insertion at designated intervals. In the case of facilitating television program broadcasting, for example, the sourcing broadcaster may use such cues to designate advertisement avails or other time space where digital program insertion may be desirable, e.g., portions of the broadcasts having advertisement related video frames or blanks awaiting advertisement to be inserted.
Cable television providers, multiple system operators (MSOs) and other system/data providers, such as but not limited to Internet service providers (ISPs), voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service providers, cellular telecommunications service providers, etc., may rely upon the cues or other information included within the transport stream by the broadcaster to identify insertion opportunities. Such providers may insert advertisements or other desired contented within the corresponding avails prior to subsequently transmitting related transport streams/signaling to their customers, i.e., to provide digital insertion at locations downstream of the broadcasters and upstream of the customers. The ability to facilitate advertisement insertion or other digital program insertion at locations upstream of the customers may be beneficial in commonly transmitting the insertions to multiple customers, e.g., each customer connected to a common tap/trunk or wireless network may receive the same insertions. While this capability may be beneficial in some cases, one non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates a need to provide a more granular or customer specific capability for inserting advertisements or performing other digital program insertion. The present invention contemplates achieving this by facilitating insertions at a customer premise or other location downstream of the server provider or other entity performing insertions downstream of the broadcasters, such as at a client or other device used to support customer-side access to service provider originating transport streams.